Deathstalker 04 - Deathstalker Honor

set up to spy on me. Reported everything I said and did to a contact on Golgotha. Oz found out and told me, but I didn’t care. I was just a minor scholar in those days, with no interest in politics. Her reports must have made really boring reading. Occasionally I’d say something controversial just so they wouldn’t consider taking her away from me. We were so happy. I don’t think we ever once had an argument. Seven years we had together.
    Sometimes I think that was the last time I was ever really happy. That I treasured it so much because somehow, deep down, I knew someday it would all be taken away from me. “I loved her so much. I never thought I’d have to kill her. Stick a knife in her ribs, and twist it, and then hold her in my arms as she bled to death.”
    “Jesus, Owen…”
    “I would have saved her if I could.”
    “She tried to kill you.”
    “Sometimes I think she did. I never did ask her if she loved me. I was afraid of what her answer might be. Maybe if I’d known, she wouldn’t have taken so much of me with her when she died.”
    “Stop that right now, Deathstalker. If you start getting maudlin on me, I am going to get up out of this chair and come over and slap you around the head.” Owen smiled briefly. “You would too, wouldn’t you?” “Damn right I would. Never put yourself down, Owen; there are always plenty of other people just waiting for the chance to do it for you. Cathy’s the past. Let it go and move on.”
    “You’re the one who brought it up,” Owen said mildly. “And I don’t know why you’re so interested in my romantic past all of a sudden. You’re the one with all the surprises in that department. I still haven’t got over that time in Mistport when the Wampyr called Abbott turned out to be one of your exes.” “He was a mistake.”
    “And nowhere near the first or the last, by all accounts.”
    Hazel glared at him. “Who’s been talking?”
    “Practically everybody. The gossip columnists love you. You’ve got your own magazine on the Matrix Internet. With daily updates.” “You haven’t been reading that rubbish, have you?”
    “Nah. I just look at the pictures.”
    When they finally disembarked, in the great city known as the Parade of the Endless, home to Golgotha’s remaining government, Owen and Hazel found themselves beseiged by a crowd of reporters.
    Most of the major news organizations were represented, and all of the minor ones with stringers on Golgotha. Owen and Hazel’s exploits were always news, and the reports trickling in on what they’d found and done on Virimonde had raised the journalists’ expectations to the boiling point. They surged around Owen and Hazel, shouting their questions, while cameras swooped and dived overhead, searching for the best shots. Interviewers tried to elbow each other out of the way, and fistfights broke out at the back. Even so, no one got too close to Owen or Hazel. They’d learned better, usually the hard way. Hazel hadn’t actually killed a reporter yet, but the smart money was on when rather than if. There were even betting pools on some of the more obnoxious tabloid characters. Owen waited patiently for them to calm down a little and sort out their own seniority, while Hazel glared furiously in all directions and kept her hands worryingly near her weapons. It did absolutely nothing for her temper that most of her questions these days tended to be pointed inquiries about her relationship with the revered Deathstalker. She’d tried being facetious, but they just reported everything she said as fact. She’d tried hitting everyone who brought up the subject, but the others just filmed her doing it. Mostly these days she just settled for “no comment,” or a similar two-word answer, the second of which was usually “off.” It didn’t help her temper at all that Owen found the whole business vastly amusing, and always winked at the cameras when he said his “no comment.”
    And then one of the reporters brought up the recent Deathstalker movie, and cranked up the tension a whole other notch.
    The rebellion hadn’t been finished a week before the first documentaries had hit the holoscreens—feature-length films cobbled together from film footage of varying clarity and integrity. But as people have always preferred the comforts of Romance to the dry facts of History, it wasn’t long before the documentaries were roughly shouldered from the holoscreens by the first Deathstalker